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Professor-Ermitus Helen Armstrong presented this paper at the Liquid Cities Symposium, "A Conversation between Berlin and Sydney, October 2007, Sydney (www.liquidcities.net). She comments:"The haunting qualities of Sydney have almost gone; easily forgotten under ubiquitous firework displays. When did circumspection about the new, change to indiscriminate delight? How did Sydneysiders become addicted to the urban playground of spectacular events? In this glass environment of mirrored surfaces and brightly coloured public spaces, what possible value can dark derelict sites have?

Living in the bright city requires a culture of forgetting, particularly the recent failed industrial project; but such erasure is strangely disturbing.Forgetting requires constant vigilance. Until we expunge all the sad left-over spaces, they will continue to have an uncanny presence. Such old sites convey a seductive melancholy. The age and unkemptness in these shadowy voids quietly challenge the apparent complacency of the new.

Once familiar, they now assume a discomforting presence. They convey a sense of dread and lurking unease. But this modern urban estrangement is equally a way of connecting, of being grounded. Rather than repressing disquiet, it is a way of accepting the other, the intangible, the savage lyricism within the dark.

My conversation considers the depth of meaning, mysteriousness, and poetic beauty embedded in urban wastelands and I suggest that disturbing landscapes are valuable parts of everyday life. Walking in the footsteps of Benjamin, the Situationalists, and de Certeau, I talk about the disturbing spectacle city. In my conversation, I share the dark spaces with Lacan and Kristeva and the new dérivistes that make up STALKER, suggesting that an intangible city is a mosaic of light and dark spaces, complex and layered, and rich with possibilities. Such a city is not afraid to remember nor does it fear disturbing landscapes."

SYDNEY: NO SHADES OF GRAY: ERASING DIRT & DERELICTION

by Helen Armstrong

posted 12/09/11

Introduction

With the rise of creative industries, so called ‘creative cities’ (Landry,2000) are being developed and marketed as attractive places intended to lure the emerging ‘creative class’. This paper argues for a different link between creativity and place. It contributes the voice for grey landscapes; not picturesque nor idyllic but haunting, indeterminate and diffuse. Often dirty and derelict, these places are nevertheless vitally important to living creatively in the city. In rapidly growing cities, such grey and disturbing landscapes, the left-over spaces and urban wastelands, are disappearing.

In contrast to Berlin, a city renowned for its creativity, Sydney is fast becoming a uniform urban landscape of consumption punched through by conduit landscapes of infrastructure. Erasing dirt and dereliction is actively pursued by urban designers and city planners who construct ‘landscape’ as clean, green spaces for recreation and nature. Microcosms of urban grit may be allowed if it provides a grain of authenticity to Sydney’s urban villages, those highly managed memory landscapes for the affluent so-called ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002). Such places have few real memories; instead ‘memory’ is just another commodity, this time manufactured by the Heritage Industry. Even those shrinking vestiges of landscape dedicated as nature and water reserves are frequently over-managed parklands. In the main urban landscapes in Sydney are typical of growing 21st century cities - over-designed, over-managed and over-controlled.

Instead, urban landscapes can be complex tapestries made up of the old, the new, the familiar and everyday, associated with housing, shopping centres/malls, and infrastructure - roads, rail and utilities - as well as sites of production. Of equal importance are the left over spaces and wastelands threaded through the city. Such left-over spaces are saturated with memories and meanings. They are disturbing and uncanny and because of this they have much to contribute to creativity within the city.

Living and playing in the current version of Sydney as a creative city is both exhilarating and comforting where only sanctioned memories provide a sense of place. Despite this when the ordinary, unkempt and familiar places disappear, there may be a discomforting sense of loss – not a cry of grief but a whimper that seeps into our complacency about the new up-to-date city. This paper asks where are the shades of grey, those left-over areas that punctuate the mid-ground or fade in the background? Where are those important pauses in the otherwise colourful city?

Apart from demonising the homogeneity of Late Capitalism, we can also challenge segmental planning where city building has become a matrix of well-designed fragments of fictional lifestyles and imaginary behaviours. As Christine Boyer(1996:28) says ‘we have lost the interpretative means to translate memories and traditions into meaningful contemporary forms’.

With increasing high-rise development on former industrial sites, few would argue against making cities denser. One can however ask planners and urban designers why there was no concerted effort to find more complex answers to such an important aspect of the urban fabric. Was it necessary to be so expedient? In Sydney this is exemplified by the barely resisted change from a working harbour to a watery playground.

Equally important, urban voids and wastelands can insinuate into the future, like tendrils of probing and clinging vines on old walls where they can quietly persist holding the potential to be indeterminate spaces that allow for innovative temporary uses, absorbing nomadic experiments designed for a future beyond the Late Capitalism and the urban form associated with Neo-liberalism.

I seek to show that there is potential for deep dwelling and creativity in the last vestiges of what was, until recently, a complex web of marginal urban space in the form of small left-over spaces, the large urban voids, easements and sidings as well as derelict industrial lands. Seen by planners and designers as dirty useless wastelands, I suggest that these are actually the spaces for optimism and hopeful alternatives to the thin landscapes of 21st century spectacle cities. To support this I will refer to the work of current urban artists who walk the city – STALKER from Italy, Boris Sieverts from Germany, Misguide from Britain to name a few.

As well, I will add to the discourse other voices such as Camus, de Certeau, de Sola-Morales, Vidler, even Schama and Virilio, and of course Benjamin, Kracauer and Freud, with some brief thoughts from Kristeva and Lacan. These impressive writers and artists are all wedded to the value of marginal spaces in the city.

Looking Again at Urban Wastelands

Simon Schama, in Landscape and Memory (1995), suggested that we reexamine familiar landscapes, places we already know but somehow have eluded deeper appreciation, using a contemporary gaze. He argues this is not a dirge about lost landscapes but rather an exploration of what we are yet to find.

Voids and wastelands are latent with such possibilities, but their prevailing qualities are of recent uncomfortable memories about ultimately flawed dreams and visions of an industrial world. Vast derelict industrial lands resonate with messages of failure. That such huge landscapes, the visions of merely fifty years ago, should now be in ruins is disturbing, possibly explaining why they are being erased so quickly and without resistance.

Such dereliction is even more alarming if we consider Virilio’s concept of the space/time collapse. Like Schama, he urges us to take a second look at the recent past, this time allowing for reflection, even if discomforting, rather than merely mining the past for new commodification themes because the ‘time allotted to decision-making is now insufficient’ (Virilio, 2000:96). Given the space/time collapse, one could ask how short will the time be before optimistic urban gestures of today – say, Darling Harbour, Sydney or Melbourne Docklands – become like the wastelands of Detroit?

Why does rust arouse such alarm when ruins have been the focus of picturesque settings since the 18th century? Picon (2000:79) suggests that ruins restore man to nature while rust confines him in the middle of his enterprises as if within a prison, all the more terrible because he built it. I argue that we are not imprisoned by rust but by shiny new commodities.

Sometimes referred to as landscapes of contempt (Girot,2004), voids, wastelands and derelict spaces in our cities are not merely contemptuous spaces – places of blight, heavy with memories of human exploitation and environmental negligence - they are also places of great beauty. They are rich in opportunities to reflect on our recent past, the present and also future landscapes that can be experimental and innovative. These wastelands allow us to commune with ‘place’ as a layered landscape – complex and disturbing as much as reassuring. Here we can regain the ability to accept the ‘ugly’ and learn from its strange and resonating qualities.

This involves persistently challenging the tautological uniformity of contemporary spectacle cities. Liquid cities, like Baumann’s (2000) liquid modernity, have new multiple and flexible identities however, such identities tend to be dominated by consumption and spectacle. Within this flexible domain, marginal spaces, by resisting change, can remain conceptually diffuse and indeterminate and of key importance - challenging.

In a comparison between Berlin and Sydney, it is important to note that globalised and liquid cities in Europe take on a different form to the growing cities in Australia. In Europe, many cities including Berlin are shrinking and so while connected to the global and exhibiting flexibility in many vital and new ways, they also hold their complex and layered marginal places.

Liquid Sydney and its disappearing alchemy

Global Sydney is not maintaining its layered and complex form. It nevertheless continues to market a liquid image – the glistening harbour, the scalloped edge of beaches, the amber liquid quenching the bronze Aussie thirst, the liquid capital that despite warnings does not seem to dry up. Such literal liquid descriptions convey the hedonism and abundance of a spectacle city.

But there is also seeping Sydney – the trickles, the moss-thickened sandstone quarry cuts, the iridescent oozing of old industrial areas – all like watermark traces that smudge and puddle throughout the city. Enigmatic, tantalizing and obscure these deliquescent descriptions convey different aspects of Sydney’s alchemy.

Spaces with rich alchemic value are the same dull grey spaces which are seen as dirty, derelict and empty. Sadly, they are being erased which is most unwise because the alchemy in these places can transmute their abjection into an elusive form of creativity that is much richer than the commodified creativity currently satiating people in the 21st century spectacle city.

Shades of Landscape Greys

Using shades of grey as indicators of complexity, urban landscapes can vary from almost white to almost black. On this sliding grayscale the brightest are the sites of continuous spectacle and play, sliding through to mid grey small left over spaces, deeper grey urban voids, and to almost black gothic derelict industrial lands.

Deep grey landscapes of former industry are rapidly being lightened into new housing areas, however I argue this form of development is too easy. Of what value to a creative city are the heavily secured high-rise towers of affluent urban dwellers, with their token gesture of a public waterside board walk? How do these affluent ghettos contribute to a sustainable city of the future? Why has it not been possible to hold the concept of a working harbour where sites of former industry can be fitting locations to explore innovative technologies for small scale alternative energy production and waste management? Working on the micro-scale, little tactics of habitus (Foucault,1980) and local sites of resistance can contribute different, albeit messy, answers to our complex future problems.

The very sites of former industry are pregnant with possibilities. Instead we have scraped away evidence of our abject soiled city body. Like Kristeva’s (1981,1991) abject menstruating woman, we see these sites as contaminated instead of fertile with opportunities for creative and innovative ways to transform cities.

Exploring complex innovations has not been possible because of the Faustian bargain of late capitalism’s neo-liberal economics and the withdrawal of government’s role to pursue innovation. Where is the critical coalescence of creativity that used to make up the Special Project’s section of the NSW Government Architect’s office? Richard Florida’s creative class and their clever commodities are not up to the task of rethinking the urban (Florida, 2002). I suggest we look again at marginal lands because they are places that hold secrets of possible futures. They are sites for reflection and contemplation which through their disturbing qualities stimulate a form of creativity that keeps us engaged with deep dwelling.

People might say who wants to dwell deeply when we could be living vivaciously in light cities; cities where there are few shadows and greys are simply designer colours, slightly deeper than white.

Sydney is such a light city striving to be free of recent memories. Instead it is brim full of the ‘now’ – a colourful playground of designer pleasures. Camus, however, alerted us to the risks of such cities when he prepared a ‘Short Guide to Towns without a Past’. He wrote:The cities I speak of…are towns without a past. Thus they are without tenderness or abandon. During the boredom of siesta hours, their sadness is implacable and has no melancholy. In the morning light, or in the natural luxury of the evenings, their delights are equally ungentle. These towns give nothing to the mind and everything to the passions. They are suited neither to wisdom nor the delicacies of taste.

Albert Camus, ‘A Short Guide to Towns without a Past’.

Bleaching the Flâneur

It is not only the brittleness of such cities that is of concern. The shadowless 21st century spectacle city has bleached out the flâneur ( Benjamin,1999). Benjamin’s flâneur needed to be able to move between light and dark spaces. Only by walking in dark spaces could he observe the areas bathed in light with discrimination. He was a circumspect spectator who could choose to participate in the commodity spectacle while equally choosing to withdraw and pause. In today’s over-designed and over-planned cities, there are few places where one can withdraw. Instead spectacle cities are characterised by a kind of urban hysteria – the delirious will to party and shop.

Adopting Totemism

Driven by the discomforting recent past which speaks of the failure of the industrial project, it would appear that we are happy to have all evidence of this replaced by totems thus ameliorating the violent act of deindustrialization. This activity draws from Freud’s notion of totemism (Freud, 1913); a system of substitutions where one societal model replaces another in such a way that ‘smoothes things over’ and renders change as comfortable. What makes totemism particularly apt for analyzing post-industrial space is what it suppresses (Crinson & Tyrer, 2005). It allows us to replace the industrial landscape with new or gentrified areas decorated with sanitized reworked industrial references. The worker housing is now charming. Interpenetrated with diminished public places of manicured lawns and trees; disarming complexes of paved streets and cul-de-sacs imply that all can be middle-class consumers.

These are now Kracauer’s (1932, 1947) ‘streets without memories’, places with a shallow present and limited future. Not necessarily limited in time, but limited in possibilities because such pale shades of grey do not provide the incentive for creativity in its profound sense. Innovations rarely arise when we are satisfied and comfortable.

Seductive enclaves may flourish in Richard Florida’s type of creative cities, but we need to be disturbed and confronted if we are to experience Kracauer’s notion of urban ’shock’ as a catalyst to deep creativity. While successfully competing within global flexibility, Sydney is nevertheless brittle. If it is to be flexible and liquid in the same way as Berlin, it needs to stem the loss of grey spaces – the marginal lands, and to accept dirt and dereliction as part of the fabric of urban life.

The Culture of Forgetting

Buoyant post-industrial cities are actively involved in the culture of forgetting. Sidetracked by seductive shops and urban play, the city dwellers, their urban planners and the urban boosters are caught up in a dysfunctional amnesia related to memories of shame which need to be repressed or avoided. Filling the gaps with more pleasant thoughts requires active maintenance. As Mark Crinson points out in his recent book on Urban Memory (2005:80), the desire for urban transformation into the post-industrial comes at the cost of losing the familiar marks of modernity.

In the dialectics of demolition there will always be debris, loose threads and dust. These are the remains of the last things and when they are gone, to quote Crinson (2005:18) ‘there is a haunting absence rather than a haunting presence’. Debris is needed to dwell deeply, to go beyond the brittle surface, to heed Camus’ message about cities without places for memory and reverie.

Re-thinking De Sola-Morales: his Unfinished Project

It is timely to re-affirm Ignasi de Sola-Morales, because his influential work is an unfinished project and has increasing urgency for Australian cities. It was more than fifteen years ago when the Barcelonan urbanist first alerted us to the value of marginal places when he exhorted urban planners to revisit the concept of Terrains Vagues – those strange and undefined empty spaces (De Sola-Morales,1996). The Terrains Vagues photographs of the 1960s-70s conveyed the beauty in abandoned spaces hovering between instability and emptiness; unoccupied and uncertain.

De Sola-Morales suggested empty places are fundamental to the evocative potential of the city. They are latent places where the absence of use can create a sense of freedom and expectancy – the space of the possible. The sheer extent of derelict landscapes in the shrinking cities of Eastern Europe and Detroit are challenging. Despite this, de Sola-Morales suggested that the special qualities of vacant urban space should be understood and respected and he warned against doing predictable designs for such places. Today there are an increasing number of artists and architects focussing on the fragments and traces in desolate empty space, not to conserve them but to learn how the sites can inform the future (Rendell, 2006). Sydney, however, has lost most of these interesting voids, often under just such predictable designs for single uses.

Film-makers have long recognised the value of urban voids. Wim Wenders (1988:44) observed, "I don't believe anyone will ever be able to make any city council understand that from an urbanistic point of view, the most attractive parts of the city are precisely those areas where nobody has ever done anything." The Greek architectural theorist, Yorgos Simeoforidis, echoed these sentiments, pointing out ‘the urge to do something, to fill these voids with architecture, and the need to do nothing - ultimately, this is the paradox of our metropolitan 'uncanny' condition’ (Simeoforidis,1997:6).

Such ambivalent feelings about post-industrial voids have been explored by Tim Edensor through a series of photographic exhibitions. His website (2002) and recent book, Industrial Ruins (2005), state ‘… industrial ruins are largely understood – especially by bureaucrats, city promoters and planners - as offensive to the character and aesthetics of the city’ (2002:1).

He notes that their prevailing attitude is that ‘…The sooner these scars on the landscape are demolished and swept away, effaced in the name of civic order, the better…. Imagined as sites of urban disorder, dens into which deviant characters – drug-users, gang-members, vandals and the homeless – are drawn, the imperative is to extinguish their decaying features from the urban backdrop’ (2002:1) To counteract these attitudes, Edensor suggests ‘…ruins can be explored for effects that talk back … to the extensive over-commodification of places, to middle-class aesthetics, and to broader tendencies to fix meanings in the service of power.’ http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/humanities_and_soc_sciences/te1

In our current smooth and striated space (Deleuze & Guattari,2003) where we glide over the surface of over-designed urban places, we are easily seduced into forgetting about the recent past. The landscapes of our cities are so pervasively programmed that there are few places where one can withdraw to linger and reflect.

Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces, neglected sites can provide a different beauty in the city; an aesthetic of disorder, surprise and sensuality, offering ghostly glimpses into the past and tactile encounters with a forgotten materiality.

Edensor (2005) highlights the danger of eradicating such evocative urban sites through policies that privilege large-scale new developments because it is precisely the fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins and wastelands deeply meaningful. This meaning is not just nostalgia, although nostalgia is inevitably an aspect of ruins and wastelands. Andreas Huyssen (2006) in his recent discussion on nostalgia, points out that nostalgia for the recent past is seen as negative because it undermines progress; however it can also be a kind of ‘utopia in reverse’ because the ruins of modernity might still hold promises for alternative futures.

Likewise De Sola-Morales in his manifesto ‘Flexible Differences’(1998) was not just nostalgic. He was wedded to the DeLeuzian concept of contemporary flexibility, but still committed to ethical and social responsibility. He believed

‘the task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past but the redemption of hopes that we held in the past – the redemption of optimism’. (Sola-Morales,1998:5)

His manifesto sought to distinguish between knowledge and consciousness, arguing that knowledge reproduces the same; it is only tautology. Is Sydney a tautological city?

In contrast, consciousness is discerning judgment which has the power to overturn clichés. Such discerning judgment thrives in spaces of difference, obscurity, and challenge. These sites allow for the return of subjectivity and introspection, not comfort. They are the spaces that shock and disturb and may even evoke the awesomeness and fear of the Sublime

Revising the Burkean Sublime

There is a form of Sublime in urban ruins where one can find Benjamin’s melancholy baroque of allegories, ruins, and fragments.

Such sites offer a different kind of contemplation and reverie. As we probe more deeply there is a chance of a new urban Sublime – the delightful terror and desolate melancholy of the industrial landscape. In the 21st century, the Burkean Sublime is a fading phenomenon. We are no longer in awe of wilderness. There is not a wild place left that cannot be visited by tourists. But here in the midst of our cities lies the savage lyricism of the ruin – the awesome failure of modernism. In these dark, uncertain, confusing sites lie compelling and fearful challenges to our image of ourselves as sophisticated 21st century urbanites.

The 18th century Sublime engendered humility. One could view with terror but it was delightful because one was safe. Perhaps the role of 21st century Sublime is not only to evoke awesomeness of industrial failure and equally the alarm over current globalised control but also to engender hope and inventiveness.

The abandoned spaces in our cities are a hovering presence that whispers that you can escape, even momentarily, the over-designed, over-prescribed, over controlled spectacle city.

Lyotard (1994) saw that the notion of the Sublime could emerge as a modern aesthetic, arising from the essential indeterminacy of the conflicted changes in the modern world. In grey marginal urban spaces, art can reveal this emotional intensity and its sense of shock; the very shock that Kracauer argued is a prerequisite for creativity; the shock that is needed to awake us out of comfortable forgetfulness, to make us sensitive to sudden and profound memories.

Uncanny Doubling: Integration and Estrangement

Both hauntingly familiar and unfamiliar, urban voids and wastelands are uncanny spaces allowing for reflective engagement with the problems of identity, self and other, the psyche and dwelling, the individual and metropolis. Anthony Vidler, the architectural theorist, has shown a keen understanding of the uncanny in urban space. In The Architectural Uncanny (1992) and Warped Space (2000) he sees the uncanny as a trope for imaging the lost home of post-industrial society, where the unsettling urbanity of late modernity generates a feeling of powerlessness embodied in new public spaces of designed control (Vidler,2000). In this context, existing urban voids act as a counter narrative conveying a sense of transgressive freedom.

Such transgressive qualities are also explored by Dylan Trigg (2004) in his essay, Uncanny Space of Decay. He suggests that we are drawn to these sites by a particular intricacy - an embroidery ofdecay - so unlike the uniform pastel housing and commercial developments that now occupy urban space.

Trigg writes about the seductive melancholy associated with the uncanny spaces of dereliction. He reiterates Freud’s argument that the power of the uncanny is that it ought to remain hidden but keeps coming to light. It is the age and corrosion in wastelands that challenges the apparent safety of redevelopments; the uncanny does not remain repressed. Instead decaying sites conflate the past with the present and presence with absence and in this state continue to haunt and question the complacency of the new.

Developing Resilience

The grey spaces of marginality can also be symbols of an uncomfortable groundedness. The pervasive and seductive forces that seek to disconnect us from a sense of locality, so that we are fully integrated into the de-territorised global, do not warn us that integration and estrangement are two faces of the same coin. Both de Sola-Morales (1998) and Vidler (1992) point out that we live in today’s cities as uncanny doubles, perceived as connected and integrated into the global while also roaming between estrangement of self and others and self and the world.

In this nomadic state, integration, coherence and synthesis are in fact unattainable. It is little wonder that we readily embrace the glittering new and seek to erase those spaces that remind us of our powerlessness. But it is the ability to move between the grey marginal spaces and the colourful new, between play and reflection that brings about resilience.

There is also resilience in accepting risk-laden public space. Kraftl (2007:127) in his recent study of utopias observes that discomfort can be a positive urban experience. He argues that in dense, disorderly cities lie the tools to teach people to live with flexibility and accept risks.

The grey marginal spaces are a form of Kristeva’s Abject (1982). These spaces do not conform to ideas of good urban space but rather are like our bodily excretions, they are embarrassing waste to be flushed away, garbage, urban blight. These spaces are the other to the clean and proper urban body (Langford, 2006). They also exhibit the Lacanian Real (Foster,1996) – not language and the discourse of ideas, but just an unsettling experience and as such embodied catalysts for reflexivity – ways to be aware of the thinness of everyday life in the spectacle city and to recognize the need to search for other, perhaps less colourful and shiny, forms of the new.

The intimacy, loneliness and discomfort of grey spaces need no longer be avoided, instead there is an opportunity to explore a Nietzschean sense of desertion, abandonment and the indeterminate twilight to generate truly provocative creativity. Likewise, the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari argues that the metropolitan experience is not constructed through dwelling and celebration as much as through desertion and desolation (Cacciari,1993). He suggests our dwelling is split, subject to absence as much as presence and this conceptually confusing state is intellectually productive as we ebb and flow in a ‘contemporary multitude of fluid topographies’ ( as cited in de Sola-Morales, 1998:65)

The silence of these grey spaces is like the silence of the surface of the Moon where the topography affords us information that is as disturbing as it is useless (de Sola-Morales, 1998:25). But is it useless? In a city such as Sydney, are not these spaces vitally useful as catalysts for deep dwelling and creativity?

De Certeau’s Silent Forces in the Landscape

To bring to the conversation yet another significant voice, de Certeau speaks of urban debris. He considers spaces of dirt and dereliction as bumps on the smooth surface of urban utopias. Such bumps talk of the forgotten and strange city where uncanniness lurks in everyday life. He describes these spaces as the ghosts that continue to haunt urban planning (de Certeau,1998). Recognizing the value of the untamed quality of these places, he says

…a stranger is already in residence. This gothic novel scenario…gives the city dweller the possibility of imaging the city, dreaming it, and thus living it…it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city liveable (de Certeau,1998:133)

De Certeau is fascinated by the silent forces in these landscapes. He is intrigued by their character, their secret personae, the way they open a certain depth to the present – particularly the way they resist taming the strangeness of the past with meaning. They remain wild, delinquent and silent.

Despite this or because of this he is very wary about the desire to turn such places into ‘heritage’. He sees an inevitable trajectory between renovation as ‘heritage’ to gentrification and the market, where redeveloped wastelands become the ghettos for well off people. Suggesting these places do not include the wordless stories of childhood secret places, he adds they lack a vocabulary of objects and spaces that allow for the fantastic, the delinquent, the fearful, and illegitimate (de Certeau,1998:142) He argues that planners are unaware of what they are destroying when they select a palatable and hence marketable form of memory and heritage.

The Situationists recognized this in their critique of consumption and spectacle in Paris and groups such as STALKER are revisiting their ways of engaging with marginal space.

Dérive through Landscapes of Contempt.

In the 1960s Situationists, wandering around in small activist groups, explored their revolutionary politics in urban space, particularly their ideas of dérive and ‘détournement’ or the destabilizing of presumed spatial order. The Situationists argued that by creating a state of indeterminacy, thus confronting the regulated spatiality imposed by pervasive modernist urbanism, there was the potential for innovation (Sadler, 1999).

To startle people out of their amnesia, the Situationists developed particular rituals and activities that enabled Parisians to rediscover their so-called ‘authentic’ life which lay within forgotten parts of the city. Their activities, which they described as ‘dérive’ and ‘détournement’, celebrated random, often anarchic, events.

Dérive and Détournement

Dérive was a particularly empowering ritual. Influenced by Surrealist performance art, it required drifting through the city randomly with no prescribed journey. It was not simply a stroll but rather a deliberate disruption of habitual ways of walking in the city. Dérive was a combination of chance and planning – an organised spontaneity. ‘Dérivistes’ or ‘drifters’ were neither flâneurs nor ‘spectators’. Drifters had a clear intention to experience bizarre encounters in unfamiliar places and left-over city spaces.

The random journeys were seen as forms of transgression and as such were liberating. Through urban drifting one developed a type of awareness about one’s relationship to the city and oneself that was normally masked by the orchestrated city of consumption.

In contrast, détournement was a more focused activity. It involved subtle anarchic changes to existing urban displays, such as altering billboards so that they delivered amusing but subversive messages. Artists were central to these rituals. They created “constructed encounters” or creative moments in specific urban settings. Such encounters were intended to agitate against the particular sterility and oppression of mass production and its associated economic and political systems. With these intentions, it is understandable that the Situationists were key figures in the student riots of 1968 whose messages of social responsibility in the city continued to resonate.

It was forty years ago when these French activists alerted us to such issues. Today we see the full impact of the hegemonic control of late-capitalism on urban space – a uniform space of consumption. Wastelands and voids offer quiet relief from the urban chatter of the café culture, but it is not the tranquility of nature. It is something else that is equally important. These places both ground us and disturb us. They are the spaces for ‘dérive’, where one can wander through the left-over spaces of everyday life, randomly and often playfully drifting, even risking encounters with the unpleasant, in contrast to the re-assuring promenades created by planners and designers. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s(1999) flâneur who drifts through crowded city places, the voids and wastelands are quiet places, often with uncanny resonances, where one encounters the stranger within oneself.

Utopianism within Wastelands

Deep creativity is often driven by a desire for a better future, a dialogue between dystopia and utopia.

There has been some interesting new work on the links between the unhomely and utopias. Kraftl (2007:125) argues that this relationship - utopia, the unhomely, the risky, and the ruinant - is evident in disruptive spaces; the spaces which challenge traditional concepts of utopian good. He questions naïve utopian planning that ignores the contributions within dystopias; including learning to live with disorder and diversity. He proposes that the notion of ruins can be re-theorised to provide a new aesthetic – a creative and ethical version of utopia (2007:136), arguing that for a good town planner, decay in the present and in the future should be one of the tricks in the planners’ box (Kraftl,2007:138).

Dereliction and Beauty

Photographers, poets, artists, and writers, exploring the fragmentary human experience of the 21st century world, are similarly concerned that wastelands are disappearing and with them the powerful connection between dereliction and beauty (AGNSW,2005).

The wastelands at the edge of cities as much as the urban voids in the centre have inspired the Australian artist, Bill Henson, whose evocative photographs capture ambiguous urban spaces. He conveys the haunting beauty of the 'no-man's land' in our cities where images of troubled couples awake an uneasy familiarity with these sites. In his photographs we can almost smell the dereliction. Wastelands can jolt us with strange aromas, often emanating from dumped rubbish along tracks that seem to lead nowhere where an old pink fabric, twisted and soiled, strewn near a log, hints at something sinister. A broken washing machine, rust etching into its white surface, leans abused and abject; metal cans, discarded car parts – strange disconnected objects – also reveal an abstract beauty.

Huyssen (2006:20) suggests there is an uncanny relationship between these spaces and a kind of light that seems to produce darkness ’…rays of light bend and curve around things, sliding from one object to another, urging us to imagine a future beyond corporate neo-liberalism’.

DBC Pierre evokes such landscapes in his novel, Vernon God Little (2003). The wastelands on the edge of American towns are captured by the keen observations of a young adolescent on a bicycle.

Bushes on Keeter’s trail are bizarre, all spiky and gnarled, with just enough clearing between them so the unknown is never more than fifteen yards away…Old man Keeter owns this empty slab of land, miles of it probably, outside town. He puts a wrecking shop by the ole Johnson road, Keeter’s Spares and Repairs – just a mess of junk in the dirt, really. …mostly just bleached beer cans and shit.

… Martirio boys get their first taste of guns, girls and beer out here. You never forget the blade of wind that cuts across Keeter’s.(2003:97)

In the recent art project Western Front: Art as Social Space (2005), a number of artists explored evocative ways of showing human engagement with the urban landscape of Western Sydney. Through a series penetrating photographs and captions about edge wastelands, Chris Cairns reveals his identification with such places. One caption states,

I grew up across the border. Past outer Western Sydney where freeways, shopping malls, and petrol fast food strips start to break down... Somewhere along one of those late night homeward-bound drives you find the core that connects the mobile space with wood-smoke arcadia. You couldn’t see it at first because it is only visible at night, late, deserted. You need to look at the margins, near the half-constructed freeways, the abandoned drive-ins and boarded shops. Then it is there and if you slow yourself down enough, you can feel it.

Cairns, 2005

Given these different attitudes, do the designed post-industrial landscapes in our cities evoke similar lyrical descriptions? In February 2005, the reopening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art was marked by an exhibition, “Groundswell,” (Reed,2005) which showed landscape designs that have given new uses to derelict urban land. While these designs are contributions to urban public space, aesthetically resolved and functionally satisfying, their industrial past exists only as frozen set-pieces.

In Sydney, the former BP site is a strong evocation of the site’s former use for oil storage. It has a raw strength that challenges us to remember, but that is all. Designs for the former Caltex site on Ballast Point were initially a responsible attempt to combine a new park with a small scale working harbour facility. Contested responses have resulted in the removal of the waterside refueling facility. Now it will only be parkland; a missed opportunity for diversity, let alone allowing for new micro-scaled industry that addresses urban runoff storage, alternative energy production and innovative waste management.

One of the winners of the 2006 design award for European Public Open Space, NL architect’s Zaanstadt Underpass has addressed the marginal space under motorways. Likewise West 8 have explored derelict spaces in their design for Carrasco Square. The Südgelünde Nature Park in Berlin is particularly interesting as it allows for flexibility and change. There are also other designers who are working with wastelands and derelict sites in open-ended and experimental ways.

Creativity and Innovation in Vast Wastelands

The wastelands of Detroit and Eastern Germany are so vast that they almost defy redevelopment. Numerous books have been devoted to the poetic work of Peter Latz in the industrial wastelands of the Ruhr Valley, but of a vaster scale and possibly more challenging is the mining landscape south of Brandenburg where from 2000 through to 2010 a new concept of ‘landscape’ is emerging http://www.iba-see.de/.

Indeterminate Landscapes of Shrinking Cities

In contrast to the vastness of these mining wastelands, micro-tactics are emerging in the waste spaces of shrinking cities in Europe. The Arizona Markets (Aksamija,2005), one of the largest black markets in the Balkans, was an example of a self-planned city on wastelands. When the market grew to a size where problems of sanitation and fire risks needed to be addressed, the district government prepared a master plan that turned the market into a conventional shopping mall. As a result the vital and innovative market disappeared and the shopping mall is empty. The failure of planners and designers to grasp the significance of spontaneous, flexible and innovative development in public space highlights how much can be learnt from informal activities in wastelands.

Walking the Margins

Some architects and artists, recognizing this potential, have started to study urban wastelands through the act of walking, for example, the work of Boris Sieverts, the German architect/artist, in Cologne (Sieverts,2004). His studio is essentially a city travel agency from which Sieverts organizes walks in city outskirts, focusing on areas of wasteland and empty lots. He analyses the sensations brought about by such walks and tries to formulate the complexity of the underlying territory as “poetic densification”, thus transforming the usual way wastelands are perceived. He suggests that urban wastelands are one of the last urban adventures.

Intriguing strategies are also proposed by Stalker - an Italian collective of activist architects/artists - who undertake numerous projects in abandoned urban spaces, often employing the act of dérive. Their various ‘walks’ through urban voids have criss-crossed Rennes, Milan, Miami and Berlin. Similar to the Situationists, their walks result in abstract maps based on drifting through residual spaces. Using these maps, they present a reverse reading of the city where the urban mass turns into an amorphous background in contrast to the vitality of the city’s marginal zones.

They adhere to their Manifesto stating that

Stalker is together custodian, guide and artist for these sites. In the multiple roles we are disposed to confront at once the apparently unsolvable contradictions of salvaging through abandonment, of representation through sensorial perception, of intervening within the unstable and mutable conditions of these areas.http://www.osservatorionomade.net

They seek to achieve continuity and penetration into abandoned areas in the belief that such actions will

…enrich and give life to the city through the continuous and diffused confrontation with the unknown. In this way it will be possible to recover within the profound heart of the city, the wild, the non-planned, the nomadic.

An interesting long-term project has been their work in a disused abattoir, Campo Boario, on the banks of the Tiber near Rome where there are several migrant communities, a gypsy camp and an alternative cultural and political centre.

In collaboration with the Kurdish community of Campo Boario, the themes of nomadism and cultural diversity led to the ‘Flying Carpet’ project (2002), which was installed in the public space of several Mediterranean cities. Suspended over spontaneous social gatherings, the ‘Flying Carpet’ was the catalyst for Stalker to develop a nomadic university. http://www.osservatorionomade.net

Design in Abandoned Space

Stalker argues that the most effective ‘cure’ for abandoned urban spaces is to leave them alone to be overtaken by nature and to be appropriated by those people who have nowhere else to go; then the spaces are fully in use. This approach may be anarchic and extreme to many designers nevertheless it is interesting to hear the European architect, Florian Beigel, who has undertaken numerous projects on post-industrial sites, convey the dilemma of designing with abandoned sites. He reflects,

… the key issue is to do with designing emptiness, to decide where nothing will go. This word emptiness is enigmatic, … an almost inbuilt potential for getting one’s imagination going …. I feel such ‘emptiness’ is inherent to certain landscapes.

It can also be found in cracks, or holes in the city, where there cease to be rules, leaving the spaces to grow wild. Such places spark not only my imagination but also the imaginations of people who come to inhabit them.

Nonetheless, designing in these situations is a very delicate thing because such wildness is so fragile and can all too easily be destroyed…. The key is to do ‘almost nothing’ as Mies said once.

I find this a very provocative statement and a good starting point.

Florian Beigel (1997)

Nevertheless, many may feel leaving derelict sites free of development ignores the emancipatory potential of design. The new ‘Landscape Urbanists’ are exploring designs for a surreal urbanism in post-industrial areas as a new form of urban ecology (Waldheim,2006).

Micro-tactics in Derelict Landscapes

Because of the huge scale of increasingly derelict landscapes in post-soviet Europe and large post-industrial cities like Detroit, another movement, closely aligned with Landscape Urbanism, has developed micro-tactics for shrinking cities (Park, 2005). Under the EU funded ‘Shrinking CitiesProject’, these urbanists see the vast derelict landscapes as open laboratories for experiments attracting self-reliant pioneers, including urban farming, guerrilla gardening, ad hoc co-operatives, and vigorous art and music installations. Pivotal to the innovations is the International Centre for Urban Ecology, iCUE, founded by the architect, Kyong Park, seen as a nomadic laboratory for future cities.

The Halle project in East Germany focussed on Halle-Neustadt. Originally seen as a visionary 1970s Soviet new-town, by 2003 had lost half the inhabitants. This project, involving numerous artists and designers, explored new forms of urbanity using four abandoned highrise blocks.

The Shrinking Cities movement focuses on a new form of urban ecology, both people and systems, suggesting that ‘in the fault lines of the Modernist city, fresh and rebellious ideas and designs are emerging as an “architecture of resistance” ‘ (Park, 2005:176).

Project Shrinking Cities (2002-6), directed by Philipp Oswalt and Klaus Overmeyer, actively encourages new ideas for temporary land-uses for urban wasteland. In parallel, the group, Multiplicity, led by Stephano Boeri, act like urban detectives. They are searching out innovative activities in wasteland sites where, Boeri points out, ‘It is in these sites, at the periphery of geopolitical imagery, that Europe is changing most rapidly. It is here that innovations emerge and it is possible to imagine the future…’ (Boeri, 2005:154)

Conclusion

From innocence to cynicism, the spectacle city has increasingly induced us into urban amnesia; a consumerist drug to sustain the culture of forgetting. The rise of seductive urban play is counterpoised against the demise of the industrial city and the invisible control of Late Capitalism with its associated commodification of everyday life.

To move from solid modernity to Baumann’s liquid modernity of floating and changing networks requires that individuals have a strong ability for self-reflection, if they are to exercise choice rather than be unaware consumers. Noting Ulrick Beck’s concepts of reflexive modernization, where does the contemporary metropolitan learn the skills to negotiate the multiple and complex influences of liquid cities? Could it be that the voids and wastelands offer just such spaces?

To wander through an urban parkland enjoying the picturesque is only one facet of reverie. It may inspire sweet poetry but it is a self-referential Proustian experience. If our liquid cities are to be more than flowing Mobius curves and flexible capital we need a mosaic of spaces that jolt, challenge, and disturb – prompting a different and uncanny reverie that does not allow for complacency.

It is in shrinking cities, where urban voids and wastelands are writ large, that we see new micro-tactics associated with the return of social concerns along with innovative approaches to future landscapes. So how do responsible planners and designers take on the challenge of grey urban landscapes and their associated dirt and dereliction in growing cities such as Sydney?

Camus, de Certeau, de Sola-Morales, Vidler, and of course Benjamin, Kracauer and Freud, with some brief thoughts from Kristeva and Lacan suggest that layered, complex, diffuse left over spaces and wastelands have much to offer the urban dweller. Perhaps the most important for this conversation between Berlin and Sydney is the way they are catalysts for creativity and innovative thought.

Helen ArmstrongSydney, October 2007

References

AGNSW (2005) ‘Wastelands – a Poetic Legacy’. Exhibition at Art Gallery of New South Wales, September 2005.

Gilloch, Graeme & Kilby, Jane (2005) ‘ Trauma and Memory in the City: from Auster to Austerlitz’ in Crinson, Mark (Ed) (2005) Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, London: Routledge pp1-22

Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984) "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.